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If that’s the case, I need to get some tips from Blumenauer on my bicycle cleaning regimen. Or did he insert funding for the DoD to develop a mud/grease/grime deflecting substance that he is now field-testing? If so, I can’t wait for the civilian product release.

Politics is theater, and if Earl weren’t considering at all times how to place visual and verbal queues into his media exposures, I’d want another representative: a professional… Well, if I lived in his district I would. How Colbert is funny is that he turns that political need and desire on it’s head and ridicules it. The cleanliness of the Trek made me think it was a prop and observe not that Earl was an evil hypocrite, but that it was sad to see decent components sit in a Senate office for the cause of setting a visual frame. I stand corrected, although I demand corroborating pictures involving Earl, a wet muddy pothole, and a bikini clad Donna Rice.

Relax, Earl has faced much more vicious political attacks than the accusation that his Ultegra front derailleur is too shiny. For political purposes, the shinier it is the bike is, the better it does “the cause” anyway. Consumer/Americans like new and gleaming products. They won’t have an attraction to a greasy/sweaty Earl and bike outside of a situation where it fits an archetypical image they expect and approve of.